The Electric Car Con
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I dunno, is this a valid analysis?
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/01/the_electric_car_con_explained.html
The related question is whether cars are a major consumer of energy and hence a significant contributor of Co2 emissions? Again, most people believe both statements are self-evidently true, hence the importance of moving to electric cars.
In fact, cars (light-duty transportation) account for less than 5% of global energy demand, with U.S. cars accounting for 19% of the global car fleet, declining to under 15% by 2050 as car demand grows faster outside the U.S.
Putting these facts together, and they are indisputable facts, provides a stunning insight.
The U.S. car fleet accounts for a mere 1.0% of global energy demand (5% x 19%), declining to 0.8% by 2050. So even if the U.S. shifts 100% to electric-powered cars, the maximum climate impact in 2050 is a meaningless 0.2% (22% x 0.8%) reduction in global Co2 emissions from the current electric grid, up to a maximum of 0.5% assuming solar, wind, and hydro can, implausibly, power 60% of electric demand.
In other words, there is no factual basis to claim that the government mandate to switch to electric cars will have any material impact on global Co2 emissions.
This is not a debatable point -- it is easily verified, it is correct under any view of climate science, and it remains true even if solar and wind magically grow sixfold over the next 25 years, which is highly unlikely given the need to build a new transmission network, estimated at more than 200,000 miles of wires crisscrossing the country, and devise totally unknown, unproven, and likely impossible to achieve large-scale, economic battery storage.
Nor does the picture change materially if the entire world goes 100% electric for cars. In that case global Co2 emissions fall a mere 3.5% in 2050 versus a baseline of 24% electric adoption by 2035.
Put simply, cars are not a meaningful source of global emissions and electric cars do not and cannot curtail the continued reliance on fossil fuels in electric generation. On top of this, counting all sources, the U.S. is responsible for only 14% of all global Co2 emissions, declining to 9% by 2050 due to rest of world economic growth.
The rest of the article is politics....
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Related. Wanna buy a used Tesla?
Rental firm Hertz Global Holdings (HTZ.O) is selling about 20,000 electric vehicles, including Teslas, from its U.S. fleet about two years after a deal with the automaker to offer its vehicles for rent, in another sign that EV demand has cooled.
Hertz will instead opt for gas-powered vehicles, it said on Thursday, citing higher expenses related to collision and damage for EVs even though it had aimed to convert 25% of its fleet to electric by 2024 end.
CEO Stephen Scherr had last year at the JPMorgan Auto Conference flagged headwinds from higher expenses for its EVs, particularly Teslas.
Hertz even limited the torque and speed on the EVs and offered it to experienced users on the platform to make them easier to adapt after certain users had front-end collisions, he said.
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I wonder what the numbers are for commercial airline traffic. I read somewhere that in the foreseeable future airplanes will continue to be a big consumer of fossil fuels because there is no viable alternative.
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I wonder what the numbers are for commercial airline traffic. I read somewhere that in the foreseeable future airplanes will continue to be a big consumer of fossil fuels because there is no viable alternative.
@bachophile said in The Electric Car Con:
I wonder what the numbers are for commercial airline traffic.
About 2.5% direct CO2, and another 1% "indirect" impact.
